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Salvador Dali's Dream of Venus

Salvador Dali's Dream of Venus

The Surrealist Funhouse from the 1939 World's Fair

by Ingrid Schaffner
Hardback
Publication Date: 01/01/2002

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$107.95
Life Magazine wrote that one funhouse at the 1939 World's Fair stood out among the others:"Dal's Dream of Venus, the creation of famed Surrealist painter Salvador Dal, is the most recent addition to the still-growing list of amusement-area girl shows and easily the most amazing. Weird building contains a dry tank and a wet tank. In the wet tank girls swim under water, milk a bandaged-up cow, tap typewriter keys which float like seaweed. Keyboard of piano is painted on the recumbent female figure made of rubber. In dry tank� a sleeping Venus reclines in 36-foot bed, covered with white and red satin, flowers, and leaves. Scattered about the bed are lobsters frying on beds of hot coals and bottles of champagne� .All this is most amusing and interesting."The building's modern, expressionistic exterior, with an entrance framed by a woman's legs, and shocking interior, including the bare-breasted "living liquid ladies" who occupied the tanks, caused quite a stir. The funhouse was so successful that it reopened for a second season, but once torn down it faded from memory and its outlandishness became the stuff of urban myth. Now, more than 60 years later, a collection of photographs of the Dream of Venus by Eric Schaal has been discovered. In stunning black-and-white and early Kodachrome, they show both the construction and the completion of the funhouse-from Dal painting a melting clock to showgirls parading for their audience. Salvador Dal's Dream of Venus reveals not only an eccentric work of architecture, but also a one-of-a-kind creation by one of the most fertile imaginations of the 20th century.
ISBN:
9781568983592
9781568983592
Category:
Non-graphic art forms
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
01-01-2002
Language:
English
Publisher:
Princeton Architectural Press
Country of origin:
United States
Dimensions (mm):
313.18x266.7x18.54mm
Weight:
1.57kg

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